OSR Log 5 - Won't You Be My Neighbor?

"How much XP do we get for filing taxes?"

The following is a campaign journal where I, the referee, lead my friends in a game of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. For all of us, this is our first venture down the Old School Renaissance style of tabletop roleplaying. Enjoy!

(SPOILERS for Tomb of the Serpent Kings by Skerples)

EPISODE 5: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

The party consists of:

Jarvey: a specialist. Dying. Level 1

McDoogle: a fighter. Also dying. Level 1

Sister Cage: a cleric who forgets she can heal people... who are dying. Level 1

Zanzibar the Magician: a magic user who doesn't know how to spell. Level 1

Not the kind of looting the news talks about.

Everyone returns to Narakib because of course they do. As they dump Jarvey and McDoogle off at the Knave and Riddle inn to get their hit points back, Sister Cage decides to pen a clerical scroll but then rereads the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rulebook and realizes she ain't spending 250 silver pieces for a spell that she can get by praying.

Sister Cage and Zanzibar then go meet Maly, the sorceress governess. Hal accompanies them in case he needs to bail them out. Zanzibar is excited because he has never met her before. Hal decides to just let Zanzibar believe what he can. Hal and Zanzibar then play with the magic eye ring. Hal puts his eye back in his socket and takes the ring off his finger—his eye returns to normal! Zanzibar suggests that Hal should take the ring off his finger when the eye is not in his socket. Hal doesn't entertain this idea.

They reach Maly's office, and Sister Cage sees a religious emblem on Maly's desk that is a triangle with an eye in the center. Zanzibar says "Hi!" Maly doesn't. When Maly asks where Hal's magic ring was obtained, Hal says it's from "a cave with some snakes in it, and Zanzibar knows their language supposedly! Nobody has verified this!" Maly then tells them she is familiar with the snake people's legends, so the party (still leery of Zanzibar's allegiance and potential Voldemorting) asks if Zanzibar and Franzibar are names with similar etymology. Maly says it's possible, then asks Zanzibar who his parents were. Zanzibar refutes their suspicion and boldly states that his father had no allegorical serpentine genetics and happened to rule as the Manzibar of his hometown—an honored position!

Maly expresses interest in a tomb full of snake people and treasure, offering the party XP in exchange for treasure they may find. The party likes this convenient source of XP dumping, so they unload their looted gear. They have around 5,150 XP in treasure and 600 XP in slaying monsters, so they level up Sister Cage, Jarvey, and Zanzibar. Zanzibar randomly obtains a spell that can hide an object's magic or make it get pseudomagic. Zanzibar contemplates burning his spellbook. Maly then offers to buy the magic eye-poppin'-out-ring from Hal, but he's offended at her paltry offer and stomps off halflingly.

The party then reveals through ten minutes of awkward hints that Arior-the-Locksmith-and-Questgiver died in the dungeon, gaining 1 XP each from slaughtering the bush they were beating around. Maly is upset that Arior died in a trap, but she reveals to the party that the gold snake amulet coin that Arior gave the party in the first episode is enchanted—by Maly—and works as a one way listening device for anyone who has a coin that was enchanted with it. The party has both. Arior was listening in on their dungeon crawl, heard three of them die in the hammer trap, then crept in after them, assuming there were no more traps.

Maly conscripts the party to clean out the snake dungeon, but to leave the basilisk alone—she may find use for a basilisk that's trapped in a room. In exchange, she signs Arior's house to the party as a permanent residence in town. The party moves into the house, which has a living room, bedroom, store room, and a little stable for a donkey. The party buys extra beds to sleep int he store room and bedroom. Hal claims the donkey stable. They then find Arior's hidden stash, consisting of 15 gp, 57 sp, and 247 cp.

It's time to meet the neighbors! First are Ariana Wheatflow and her 15-year-old son, Barda. They're confused that Arior is gone, but the party tells them that she moved away... really away. Ariana ushers her son back into the house before he gets any ideas. The party then meets Enwenen Falavaul, a 183-year-old elf woman with a bald head, light blue skin, and green eyes. She speaks very brashly, as though the party is made up of morons. Hal tries to step into her house and admire the interior, but she stops him and explains what manners are. Sister Cage is infatuated with Enwenen's skin and tries to barter for some of Enwenen's moisturizer, offering a secret in trade.

"We could be twins if I wore your skin!"

Ariana tells them to leave.

They leave.

After Sister Cage realizes that she can just heal the wounded party instead of waiting a week and doing more roleplay shit, she pops some cure wounds pills into them and they set off back to the tomb, retracing their steps. They come back to the trap room where the goblins were, and they go south through a door with a rusted, but easily broken lock. After eyeballing a peculiarly sneaky spider and deactivating some enchanted manacles by chucking a goblin corpse at it, they realize they are being tailed by another immortal headsquisher!

The party flees into a room with an ominous pit of fire and sloped edges in it. Of course that's in here! Sister Cage uses her tried-and-true slippery-when-wet technique and soaps up the floor near the fire. Everyone huddles. Except Hal, he barrels through another door and finds a sleeping mashed potato skin doo-doo goblin who has a giant broom. He names the goblin Bait. The immortal headsquisher charges into battle and fails its dexterity save, landing near the fire. The doo-doo goblin in Hal's room heeds Hal's warning that there is a headsquisher, and it runs into the room and sweeps the monster into the pit, where it stands, constantly burning, staring upward at the party, too stupid to live and too dumb to die.

"Damn if he was an immortal fire squisher he'd be giving us quest reward XP right about now."